


Those You've Pained

by plusqueparfait



Category: The Brave (TV 2017)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-05-04 21:42:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14602341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plusqueparfait/pseuds/plusqueparfait
Summary: Adam is familiar with grief, with the way it wraps its claws around your heart and steals the breath from your lungs. He’s familiar with how it can sneak up on you when you aren’t expecting it, with how it crashes over you in waves. He knows Jaz is too. But he thinks maybe she wasn’t expecting it this time.





	1. Chapter 1

-o-o-

It’s late at night when they finally arrive back on base, but Dalton builds a bonfire anyway. The rest of the team showers off the grime and exhaustion of nearly six days tracking a terrorist through the jungles of the Central African Republic and stumbles outside with six-packs of beer and a bottle of whiskey, desperately needing the release.

Amir and Preach toss horseshoes and argue over who is or isn’t cheating, while McGuire does three shots of whiskey in quick succession, his voice getting louder and faster as he tells Jaz a difficult-to-follow story about a set of twins he’d met at a tiki bar in the Seychelles.

Dalton watches her face in the flickering light of the fire as she laughs, egging McG on, sipping her beer and smirking as he feigns offense at her ribbing.

He can’t help smiling. She looks happy. Relaxed. Settled.

It’s been a long time since he’s seen her like this. Since before Tehran maybe, or even since before Elijah died.

He throws another log on the fire and grabs a fresh beer, content to sit slightly apart and watch his team. His family. 

Nobody even looks up when the sat phone rings. 

Dalton already knows it’s not another mission, not so soon after this last marathon, so he’s relaxed as he answers the call. “This is Dalton.”

“Hi Adam,” Patricia’s voice says. She sounds -- wary. Uncertain. Dalton stands up from his folding chair, unconsciously drifting away from the bonfire. “Do you have a second?”

“Sure,” he says cautiously. “Everything okay?”

“I’m sorry to call so late,” she says.

Stalling. She’s stalling. Adam frowns.

“Patricia?”

“I just got a call from Personnel,” she tells him. “It’s -- Jaz’s father had a massive stroke this morning. He’s in a coma, and they don’t expect him to recover.”

Dalton’s breath catches in his throat. His eyes drift sideways, towards Jaz. He watches as she playfully punches McGuire in the chest, her face wide open with laughter. 

Dammit. 

“Adam?” Patricia says, and he realizes he’s zoned out.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “Sorry. How much time do they think he has?”

“No more than a couple days,” Patricia says. “My understanding is that he’s on life support. They’re just waiting until Jaz can get there.”

Dalton’s heart aches. “Okay,” he manages. 

“Tell Jaz she should take as long as she needs,” Patricia continues. Her voice is formal and professional, but Dalton can hear the empathy underneath. “Hannah’s gonna get her on a transport to Ramstein in the morning, and then we’ll find a commercial flight out of Frankfurt. We’ll try to keep your team offline for a few weeks while she’s gone.”

“Thanks Patricia,” he says. He suddenly feels exhausted.

“We’ll call back with details when we have them,” she says. 

“Okay,” Dalton says woodenly. 

“And, Adam?” Patricia blurts out, before he can end the call. “Tell her -- whatever she needs. Anything at all.”

Dalton pockets the phone and leans against the side of the Quonset hut, watching her. She and McG have turned the teasing on Preach, who pretends to look affronted as Amir guffaws. 

He and Jaz high-five, and it sends a ripple of pain through Dalton’s chest. 

Dammit.

“Hey, Jaz, can I talk to you a minute?” he says, shuffling towards them, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his jeans. Best to just get it over with. Like ripping off a band-aid.

She’s still laughing as she looks up, but the smile quickly fades at the expression on his face. “Everything okay?” she asks hesitantly, eyebrows raised. 

He nods toward the Quonset hut, away from the team. “I’ve just gotta talk to you about something,” he says uncomfortably. 

Jaz turns toward McG, who shrugs. Preach puts a hand on her shoulder, and she gets up and follows Dalton into the hut. 

“What’s going on?” she asks impatiently.

“Sit, okay?” he says, gesturing towards the couch, but she folds her arms across her chest and glares at him. He sighs, rubbing his beard, unable to look at her. “Um. That was Patricia. She -- it’s your dad.”

Jaz’s entire body stiffens. Her face hardens, goes blank. “What about him?”

“He had a stroke,” he says gently, taking a cautious step towards her. “He’s in a coma.”

Jaz’s eyes give nothing away. She doesn’t move, doesn’t speak.

“I’m so sorry, Jaz,” he says.

Jaz takes a slow, shaky breath, and for a second, he thinks she might cry. “Okay,” she says instead, her voice flat and even. “Is that all?”

Dalton’s not sure what he was expecting, but that wasn’t it. “I -- uh, Patricia said to take as much time as you need,” he says. “Hannah’s gonna -- they’re working on getting you on a transport to Ramstein and then a flight out of Frankfurt. They’ll call back when--”

“No, thanks,” she says. “I’d rather -- I appreciate it, but I don’t need to go home.”

He gapes at her. 

“Jaz, your dad -- Patricia said he’s only got a couple days left,” Dalton says. Her expression doesn’t change. He tries to reason with her. “She told me they’re just waiting until you get there to disconnect the ventilator.”

She blinks once. Turns away. 

“I’m really tired,” she says. “I’m gonna go to bed.”

Dalton watches her walk away.

Shit.

-o-o-

He gives her a few minutes, then follows her to her room, knocks on the doorframe. When she doesn’t answer, he pushes aside the curtain she uses as a door and slides in.

He watches as she unlaces her boots and shucks them off, lining them up neatly in the corner. “I’m fine,” she says, before he can speak. 

“Jaz,” he tries, hesitantly. “I know this is hard, but--”

“It’s not,” she says. “I’m fine.”

She sits down on the bed, takes off her rings and sets them in the little blue Turkish ceramic dish she keeps on the nightstand. Her earrings and necklace follow, like it’s just a normal night, like she’s just casually getting ready for bed.

He sits down beside her and she flinches. It’s barely perceptible, but he notices, of course.

“He’s dying,” he says gently, cautiously. 

“Yep,” she says. 

Simple. Harsh. Calm. 

“I -- I just don’t want you to regret anything,” he says. “I know that -- your relationship with your dad hasn’t been easy, but…” He sighs, not sure how to phrase this. “If this is your last chance to say...anything you need to say…”

“You said he’s on life support, right?” she asks, and he’s never heard her this callous, this empty. “So it’s not like he could hear it anyway.”

“Yeah, but that’s not…” He studies her profile. She won’t look at him. 

“Would you go?” she asks flippantly. “If it was your dad?”

He sees right through her. He knows exactly what she’s doing, exactly how hard she’s trying to push him away. 

He won’t let her. Not this time, and he decides to call her bluff. Would he go? If he got the call that his dad was dying -- would he go?

What would he say?

“I think...I don’t know,” he says thoughtfully. “It’s hard to say until you’re there, I guess. I’ve spent twenty years telling myself I don’t need a damn thing from him, y’know? That nothing he could say would make a difference, that he didn’t deserve my forgiveness.”

“Yeah,” Jaz says hoarsely, her shoulders crumpling just the tiniest bit. 

Dalton knows very little about Jaz’s relationship with her father, aside from the fact that it no longer exists. He knows her childhood was difficult. Knows she doesn’t speak to either of her parents, that she hasn’t seen them in years. 

But he doesn’t know how it ended up that way. 

“Thing is,” he says slowly. “It’s not about him. Forgiveness, or...those last words. It’s about me. Maybe he doesn’t deserve my forgiveness, but maybe I deserve to forgive him.”

Jaz snorts. “You get that from Preach?”

Dalton doesn’t laugh. “I don’t want you to regret anything,” he says again.

She shakes her head, and he expects another brush-off, another smartass remark. Instead, her face tightens, and she lets out a choked, painful breath.

“I can’t,” she whispers. “I just can’t.”

“Okay,” he says gently, giving in. It’s his job to support her decision, whatever it is, even if it scares him.

He puts an arm around her. She leans her head against his chest.

They sit in silence until the rest of the team has gone to sleep.

-o-o-

He’s been in bed less than three hours, but he can’t seem to keep his eyes closed, and so he wanders out to the kitchen. 

And finds Jaz, sitting alone at the table, staring into space. She doesn’t look up.

He pulls two bottles of water out of the fridge and joins her.

“Please talk to me,” he whispers, when she doesn’t say anything. 

He thinks of the last time he’d said those words to her, hiding under the false bottom of a truck rocketing across Iran. She’d been barely holding herself together then.

It’s less visible now, but he thinks she might be feeling the same way.

She cocks her head to the side, her eyes fixed on a speck of dust in the distance. He waits her out.

“I was thinking about Tehran,” she says finally, and he freezes.

He hadn’t been expecting that. 

“They knocked me out, and then he...he looked at me,” Jaz says, swallowing hard. 

Dalton’s afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

She hadn’t mentioned this part in her debrief.

“He said…” Jaz stops, takes a slow, deep breath. She pauses for so long that Dalton doesn’t think she’s going to continue. “He said he’d examined my body.”

A shiver runs down his spine, and he tries to keep himself calm. Steady.

“He asked about my knee,” she whispers. “What kind of a person would do something like that, he said.”

“Your knee?” Dalton manages, dumbly.

She doesn’t look at him as she rolls up her flannel pajama bottoms, tilting her leg slightly to reveal a scar.

He’s seen it before, he realizes, and never thought much about it. Assumed it was from a combat-related injury, or knee surgery, or…

Or her father?

 

He looks up at her face, but she’s totally blank. 

“What happened?” he manages, a harsh wave of anger crashing over him. He struggles to breathe through it, to stay focused and strong and stable.

For her.

She shakes her head, just barely, her eyes light years away. He wonders what she’s seeing.

“It was a long time ago,” she says, letting the leg of her pants drop back down. “All of it.”

She finally turns to look at him, and he can’t quite manage to wipe the horror off his face in time. “Don’t,” she says, shaking her head.

“Jaz,” he breathes. He reaches towards her, but she stiffens, and he drops his hand before he can touch her. 

“I’ve got nothing left to say to him,” she says, to a point on the wall past his head. “He’s been dead to me for a long time.”

Dalton can’t help staring at her knee. He wonders what other scars she’s hiding, what other secrets she’s buried. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he whispers.

She shrugs. “I never told anyone,” she says quietly. “Did you?”

The air around them is still, heavy. “Not when I was a kid,” Dalton says, his eyes locked on hers. He’d once told her he could look into them and know exactly what she was thinking and he wishes now that it were true. “But I’ve talked about it. Since.”

“It doesn’t impact my life,” Jaz says firmly. “It never has.”

He nods, processing that. “You’re not sleeping,” he points out quietly. 

“I’m still hyped up from the mission,” she says, and he knows it’s a lie, but he doesn’t know how to call her on it.

They sit in silence for a long, long time.

“I’m gonna go for a run,” she says when the sky outside finally begins to lighten.

She stands before he can say anything, is gone before he can find a way to make her stay.

-o-o-

He alerts the guys in the morning, because -- well, they’re a team. And he can’t help thinking that this might blow up in all of their faces soon. He tells them not to push her on it, to let her come to them.

They all look skeptical about this plan.

He calls Patricia, tells her that Jaz doesn’t want to go home. He asks her to keep him updated, and to keep them out of service, at least for now. 

Amir makes breakfast. They do some physical training, go to the shooting range. Jaz says nothing, gives away nothing.

Dalton waits. And watches.

-o-o-

She wakes up screaming that night. 

It’s not completely out of the ordinary. They’ve all had their share of nightmares -- Dalton perhaps more than his share -- and they’re used to helping each other through. Jaz, in particular, had struggled in the weeks after Tehran, and they’d taken turns rolling out of bed to make sure she was okay, to sit with her until it went away.

But this one feels different. To Adam, at least. 

By the time he stumbles into her room, McG is already kneeling beside her bed, Preach and Amir watching from the doorway. She’s totally hysterical, lost in a vicious dream that won’t seem to let her go. 

“Come on, Jaz,” McG says gently, running his palm over her hair, trying to soothe her out of it. “Jaz, wake up, okay? You’re safe, Jazzy.”

She’s curled up in a ball, like a small child -- hiding, her face pressed to the pillow. She wails unintelligibly, jibberish spilling from her mouth.

“Jaz!” McG says more urgently, firmly gripping her shoulder. She stiffens, and her eyes fly open, panicked and desperate.

“Hey, hey, you’re okay,” McG says, smiling at her. “It’s just a dream, you’re okay.”

Dalton watches from the doorway, afraid to get too close, afraid to crowd her. 

“Just a dream,” McG says again, and she nods, gulping down air. 

But there’s something in her eyes that makes Dalton think it wasn’t just a dream.

-o-o-

Adam comes back from his morning workout to find Preach on the couch, waiting for him.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, hyper-alert immediately.

Preach holds up the sat phone. “Patricia called,” he says. “They’re talking hours now, not days.”

He wipes the sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his t-shirt, blinking back the rapidly forming headache.

“She doesn’t want to go.”

“Hannah said they can chopper her to Istanbul today and get her on a commercial flight at 1700,” Preach says. “She could be in New York by midnight.”

“What do you want me to do here, Preach?” Adam sighs, annoyed. 

It’s not the logistics he’s worried about.

He heads for the kitchen, aggressively rooting through the refrigerator.

Preach follows him. “She needs to go,” he says quietly, firmly.

“Well, you try telling her that,” Dalton says, shoving aside an expired container of milk, and nearly knocking over an unstable pile of carrots.

“It’s you she’ll listen to,” Preach says patiently. “She’s never gonna have any closure if she doesn’t do this. She’s never gonna find peace.”

Adam wants to scream. “What do you want me to do, Preach?” he says again, through gritted teeth. “I can’t force her to go. She doesn’t want to go, she doesn’t want to go, okay?”

“Adam…”

He slams the refrigerator door shut. “Her father was an abusive asshole, okay? She doesn’t have to go talk to him, she doesn’t need to say goodbye. She doesn’t need to give him anything.”

Preach is studying him with that look on his face, the one that makes Adam feel like he’s reading his soul. 

“Don’t do that,” he bites, stalking for the coffee machine. 

He’s expecting a fight -- he’s picking one, after all -- but instead Preach says. “Okay.”

Dalton whirls around. “Okay?”

Preach shrugs, and heads back for the couch.

“What, you’re not going to give me a big speech on closure and forgiveness and the healing power of love?” Adam demands, following him out of the kitchen.

“You don’t need me to tell you any of that,” Preach says, settling back in with a newspaper. “You already know.”

Adam can feel the anger draining out of him, can feel himself deflating like a balloon. He sinks onto the couch, burying his face in his hands. 

“What am I supposed to do?” he breathes.

Preach pats his shoulder. “Just what you’re doing. Just be there.”

-o-o-

He’s sitting on the couch that afternoon, trying and failing to edit a badly-written After Action Report, when she emerges from her room, and heads straight for him. She’s wearing a baggy hoodie with the sleeves pulled over her hands, and all he can think is that she looks like a little kid. 

He closes his laptop. 

“When I was seven,” she says haltingly, then shakes her head.

He holds out a hand, nodding his head toward the couch beside him. She sits down on the empty cushion.

She still can’t manage to speak, and he holds his breath. 

“Look, my dad couldn’t stand me, okay?” she says bitterly. “He had a temper, and he was violent and I was afraid of him every single second of every day.”

“He hit you?” Adam asks quietly. 

“Yeah,” she clips. “If my bed wasn’t made the way he liked it or if I made noise while he was watching his show or if I got a 98 on a spelling test. Anything at all.”

Dalton takes this in, trying not to let his mind conjure up a tiny Jaz, clutching a slightly less-than-perfect homework assignment.

“Did he drink?” he can’t help asking.

“No,” Jaz says, her eyes a million miles away. “No, he would do it stone-cold sober.”

Adam thinks of his own father, of the Jekyll and Hyde transformation he’d go through after a few too many beers during the Steelers game or a little too much whiskey with his buddies on payday. He thinks of the way he’d apologize when he sobered up, of how he’d swear that he’d never meant to hurt them.

It had helped, he thinks. It had allowed him to justify his father’s anger and violence, to know in advance when things would get bad. His dad wasn’t in control, Adam had always told himself. He hadn’t wanted to hurt them. It was the alcohol. 

He wonders if it would have been better or worse for Jaz. If she’d have preferred the excuse of alcohol.

“What happened when you were seven?” he asks instead. 

He doesn’t want to know, not really. But he thinks she might need to tell him. To tell somebody.

Jaz’s hands grip her thighs, like she’s holding on. “I dropped dinner,” she says, her voice so empty it punches Adam in the gut. “I was -- my mom made dinner. Every night. That was her -- that’s what he expected of her. And that night -- he was in a mood. Something at work, I don’t know. I never knew.”

She disappears for a moment, her eyes drifting. It scares him.

“She’d made his favorite,” she says after an eternity. “Hashweh. Try to -- I don’t know. It’s not like anything calmed him down or anything. But we were -- we didn’t eat with him. We just served him, while he ate. That was our role.”

She shakes her head bitterly, a tiny glimpse of the Jaz he knows. 

“My mom had gone to get him more juice,” she says, her voice shaking. “He -- waved for more hashweh. So I went to get it, and then -- I don’t know, something on TV made him mad. And he banged on the table.”

Her voice gets smaller and smaller, and he can hear the scared little girl inside.

“And you dropped dinner,” Adam finishes quietly.

“I dropped dinner,” she whispers. 

She lets out a trembling breath. “Um,” she starts, then shakes her head. “He, uh -- that was the angriest he’d ever been. I think. And he started hitting me, and screaming. Just screaming. He was so…”

She hunches over, breathing in and out. “He picked me up and threw me out the window,” she whispers, so quietly he thinks he must have misheard her.

“What?” he manages, his throat tight.

“It was a ground floor apartment,” she says, as if that explains anything. 

Adam’s heart is pounding. His head is spinning. He can’t think, can’t seem to get enough oxygen in. “He threw you out a window,” he repeats, like he might be wrong, like he can change what he heard.

Like he can change what happened.

She sits up straight, focuses again on the wall. “Yeah.”

He lets out a gasping, shaking breath, dangerously close to a sob. “Jaz.”

She shakes her head, her whole body tensing, and he knows not to touch her. “My mom took me to the hospital,” she says, and he can’t get over how calm she is. 

He wants to punch a wall. Wants to fly to New York and slide a knife across her father’s throat and watch him choke to death on his own blood.

“It could have been a lot worse,” Jaz says, and Adam has to bite his tongue to keep from screaming. “I had a concussion. A few broken ribs and a broken wrist. Some bad cuts.” She gestures towards the scar she’d shown him on her knee. “Some of the glass cut pretty deep.”

“What happened to him?” Adam manages, although he already knows the answer.

She shrugs. “We said it was an accident,” she says distantly. “I don’t think anyone even asked any questions.”

Adam wants to ask a million. He wants to know if this was the worst thing that ever happened, or if this is just the only story she can bear to tell. He wants to know if her father ever apologized, if he ever expressed any remorse or regret. He wants to know if she has any good memories of her father, or if they’re all laced with pain and terror. 

He wants to know if she became who she is because of her father or in spite of him.

Instead he sits silently. Beside her. There.

-o-o-

Hours pass. The sun sets. Preach and McG return from sparring and hit the showers. Amir starts chopping vegetables for dinner. 

Both Jaz and Dalton sit, frozen, on the couch.

No one bothers them.

“What would I even say to him?” Jaz says suddenly, and Dalton startles. “Sorry.”

He waves her off, but the moment clarifies something for him. She’s always had an uncanny ability to creep around unnoticed, to sneak up on him without a sound. He’s marveled at her preternatural capacity for disappearing, for silence, for stealth.

Now he knows where she learned it. Why she learned it.

It makes him feel a little sick.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “I think -- I guess there probably isn’t anything.”

She nods. “Yeah,” she whispers.

“I wish I could talk to him though,” Adam says, the words taking both of them by surprise.

Jaz turns to him, eyes wide. “What do you mean?”

Shit. Dalton sighs, swallows hard.

“I would want him to know that he didn’t win,” he says with a shrug, avoiding her gaze. “That he didn’t break you.”

He’s not sure what possesses him to keep talking, but the words tumble out unbidden. “I wish he could know how wrong he was about you. How amazing you are. And I want him to know how much he missed by...how he could have had you and he chose not to.”

Jaz doesn’t move, and he chances a look at her. There are tears sliding down her cheeks. 

“Top,” she whispers.

“To me that’s the worst part,” he says. He wants to reach over and wipe the tears away, but he restrains himself. “He was lucky enough to have you, and he didn’t realize it.”

Jaz chokes on a sob, and composes herself quickly. 

She swipes her hands across her face, offers him a small smile. “Thanks,” she whispers. 

-o-o-

He’s caught in a strange sort of dream -- no plot, no characters, just flashes of confusing light, of rushing water, of unsettling feelings -- when something shakes him out of it. 

He looks frantically around his room. Steadies himself, listens for the sound of the sat phone, or the noise of an intruder.

Instead, he finds Jaz sitting on the edge of his bed, her form barely visible in the dim light from his half-open window.

“Jaz,” he gasps. He can’t make out her face, can’t tell what’s going on.

She rubs her thumb against his temple, and it’s intimate and terrifying and magnetic and it’s all he can do to keep from pulling her into his arms, from wrapping his whole body around her.

“Will you come with me?” she asks.

He doesn’t hesitate.

“Of course.”

-o-o-


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, your amazing reviews blow me away! I’m so grateful!
> 
> This story is going to be pretty short, but will likely have another two chapters or so. I also do, at some point, plan to write an ending to Somehow, but it might be a little while.
> 
> Thank you all! Hope you enjoy.

-o-o-

Hannah gets them on a C-130 at 0600. They’re on the ground in Istanbul by 0730, and sitting in first class seats on a Turkish Air flight bound for JFK half an hour later. Dalton has no idea how Hannah pulled this off so quickly, but he’s grateful. 

Patricia hadn’t said a word when he’d called in the middle of the night and asked her to get the two of them on the next plane to New York. Hadn’t even blinked. 

He’d woken Preach before they’d left, after he’d stumbled out of bed and called the DIA and thrown a couple extra sets of clothes in his go-bag. Preach had nodded, and given him a small, approving smile. 

“Take care of her,” he’d said quietly, and Dalton had blinked back tears. 

Now she’s staring at the blank screen of her in-flight entertainment system and gripping the armrests so tightly her knuckles are white.

“Jaz,” he says, sliding his hand over hers. 

She jumps, shaking her head. “Sorry.”

“You okay?” he asks. He doesn’t move his hand. 

She opens her mouth -- to say she’s fine, he knows -- then closes it. Bites her lip and turns her gaze up to the ceiling. 

“No,” she whispers. 

“Yeah,” he says gently, leaning in a little closer to her. “What are you thinking about?”

He doesn’t expect her to answer -- but she surprises him again.

“Tehran,” she says. 

It’s the second time in as many days that she’s said that, and once again, it makes him freeze. 

“Tehran?” is all he can manage.

Jaz’s eyes track a flight attendant walking past him down the aisle, offering a tray of plastic cups of water. She waits until the woman is long gone.

“When they were taking me out to that van,” she says. “To -- I was thinking about how they’d hear.”

He doesn’t know what she means, but he doesn’t say anything.

“You know, like, if you’d call, or Patricia, or just some Army chaplain would show up at their door,” she continues. “And I remember wondering -- if they would care, I guess.”

Dalton has to physically struggle to keep from reacting. 

“I don’t know,” she says, shrugging it off. “I just -- wasn’t sure it would matter. If they’d be sad, or if they’d just…”

He laces his fingers through hers, pressing the tips to her palm.

He wants to tell her they’d be sad -- they’d be devastated -- because how could they not be? How could anyone not be?

But he doesn’t know, and he can’t lie to her.

And so he holds her hand. It’s all he’s got.

-o-o-

It’s jarring, as usual, to be back on US soil. Kennedy Airport is crowded and chaotic, and even though they get to cut the line at Immigration, Dalton is still a little unsettled by the noise and the people and the excess. 

He keeps his hand firmly on Jaz’s back, guiding her through customs and the baggage claim, afraid that if he loses contact she’ll disappear into the crowd.

He’s looking for the exit that will take them to the taxi line, when a familiar voice cuts through the noise.

“Adam!”

He whirls around to find -- Patricia. Striding towards them.

Dalton glances at Jaz, who’s barely able to contain her shock. “Did you…” she starts, and he shakes his head.

“Hi, Adam,” Patricia says with a small smile, when she’s finally reached them. “Jaz.”

For a second, he thinks Patricia might lean forward and hug Jaz. Instead, she grips her bicep, squeezing gently. 

“How was your flight?”

Jaz looks overwhelmed, but she nods. “Thank you for the first class seats,” she says. “It was really nice.”

“It’s the least we can do,” Patricia says. “Now, I booked you rooms at a hotel near Mt. Sinai. Do you want to go there first, or straight to the hospital?”

“The hospital,” Jaz says. “I wanna just…”

She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t need to.

“Sounds good,” Patricia says. She takes Jaz’s bag off her shoulder, ignoring her weak protests. “C’mon. I’m parked in the garage.”

Jaz looks at Dalton in amazement as Patricia takes off. He smiles, nudging her to follow.

-o-o-

Adam has never met Jaz’s mother, but he knows her immediately. 

They have the same features -- the same thick black hair, the same dark eyes and cheekbones -- but that’s where the similarities end. Mrs. Khan’s posture is stooped and uncertain, her eyes hard and beaten and weary, and Dalton flinches when he sees them.

“Ma’am,” he says politely, but she’s not looking at him. She’s focused on Jaz, who is uncharacteristically hesitating a few feet behind him.

“Jasmine,” Jaz’s mother breathes, and her eyes fill with tears. 

He can feel Jaz stiffen. “Imeh,” she says formally. 

Her mother takes a step forward, and Jaz takes an immediate step back, nearly running into Patricia. Dalton looks back and forth between them, not sure what to do or say to make this easier.

“Is he in there?” Jaz asks, nodding towards the room her mother has just left.

Jaz’s mother nods, and gestures for her to go in. 

Jaz disappears inside without another word.

-o-o-

He gives her a few minutes alone, but eventually he follows her in, leaving Mrs. Khan in the hallway with Patricia.

Jaz’s father is a small figure in an intimidating hospital bed, hooked up to tubes and machines and medicines and wires. A heart monitor ticks out a steady rhythm, the whoosh of a ventilator cuts eerily through the silence. 

Jaz is standing by the window, watching the sun set over Central Park. 

“Hey,” he says softly. She doesn’t react, so he sits down in the chair by the side of the bed. 

He studies her father’s face -- it’s thin and pale, and empty. Just a body, with nothing left inside. 

He wants to tell Jaz that her father can’t hurt her anymore -- but he knows that isn’t really true. 

“I thought one day I’d prove him wrong,” she says suddenly. 

He turns, but she’s still staring out the window, her face hidden by her hair. 

“You have,” he says.

“No, I thought -- I had this fantasy that one day he’d apologize. Or just -- say he was proud of me, or that he didn’t know any better cause that’s how he was raised, or -- just something.”

Dalton turns back to her father’s still, blank face. Wonders if he’d thought those things, even if he couldn’t give them to her. 

“I don’t know if it would have made me feel better,” she says. “Probably not, but...I don’t know.”

“It would have been nice,” he says.

“It would have been nice.”

The sun sinks below the horizon. Jaz lowers the window shade, leaving the room dark and shadowy.

“Could you give me a few minutes?” she asks, not looking at him. 

He gets up and offers her the chair. He feels the sudden urge to kiss her forehead, but he manages to resist.

“I’m outside if you need me,” he says instead.

-o-o-

She emerges 45 minutes later. Patricia has taken Jaz’s mother to a cafe down the block, but Adam is still in the hallway, waiting. He stands up as soon as she comes out.

“You okay?” he asks.

She’s shaking. 

“Can we get out of here?” she says.

She’s been crying.

“Yeah,” he says immediately, grabbing both their bags. “Let’s get out of here.”

-o-o-

Patricia’s booked them two separate rooms at a small, trendy Upper East Side hotel a few blocks from the hospital, but Adam follows Jaz into hers. 

He doesn’t want her to be alone.

Jaz wearily sets her duffel on the king-sized bed, then turns to face him.

“Thanks, Top,” she says. “I…”

She trails off, all the energy draining out of her. 

“You hungry?” he asks, trying to take care of her in the only way he knows how.

She shakes her head. 

You haven’t eaten all day, he wants to say, but he lets it go. 

He drops his own bag on the ground, cautiously perches on the edge of the bed. “Talk to me,” he says. 

She sinks down beside him, her face turned away. Her body is shaking, just slightly, and he aches -- aches -- to touch her, to hold her, but he’s not sure if he can. 

“I didn’t think I would be sad,” she chokes, and he can’t take it.

He pulls her into his arms and she cries against his chest.

-o-o-

It’s hours later when he wakes up, jet-lagged and disoriented. For a moment, he can’t figure out where he is, or what’s going on.

And then he finds Jaz in his arms.

They’d fallen asleep fully clothed, on top of the covers, with the light still on overhead, and he tells himself that that makes it all okay. No lines have been crossed, no rules broken.

Jaz’s face is relaxed and peaceful. Her eyes are still puffy, her cheeks stained with tears -- but she’s resting, and he takes comfort in that.

It’s still dark out. They don’t need to face the day yet. 

He breathes her in, then closes his eyes, and lets himself drift off again.

-o-o-

He wakes again to the sun, blinding him -- they’d also forgotten to close the window shade -- and Jaz’s voice.

“Okay,” she says. He realizes she’s on the phone. 

There’s silence.

“Yeah.”

She’s quiet for so long that he thinks the call may have ended.

“Thank you.”

He sits up, wincing as the blood drains from his head. He sees Jaz flinch at the motion.

“See you soon, then.”

She ends the call -- his phone, he realizes -- and hands it to him.

“Patricia?” he asks, and she nods. “Everything okay?”

Her eyes disappear again, fading into that far-off look he’s noticed more and more these last few days.

“Jaz?”

“My dad died a couple hours ago.”

-o-o-

Patricia takes Jaz to the Lincoln Square Century 21 to buy a dress -- she hadn’t packed one, and he can’t quite figure out whether it was because she hadn’t wanted to go to the funeral, or because she’d been subconsciously hoping there wouldn’t be a funeral -- so Adam strolls over to the conservatory gardens in Central Park and sits on a bench in the sun. The Upper East Side is crowded and bustling, even in the middle of a weekday, but this corner of the park is quiet and peaceful.

He sits alone, just breathing. In and out, in and out.

He’s worried. Really worried. Jaz had been practically catatonic since Patricia’s call -- barely responding to his questions, barely acknowledging his presence. She hasn’t cried, hasn’t done anything normal or expected or reasonable. 

He thinks she might be in shock.

He takes out his phone, scrolls through his contacts. 

Lands on Jim Dalton.

He stares at it for a while. There’s no photo, no personal touch, no indication of who Jim Dalton is.

Just a name.

It’s been months since Adam’s spoken to him. Years since they had a real conversation -- after he’d gotten out of prison, maybe. After Adam had returned from his second tour in Iraq. 

Adam hasn’t forgiven him. And he won’t -- how could he?

But now he wonders -- what if he has something to say anyway?

-o-o-

The funeral is short and simple. There’s no service, just a few words from an imam at a sprawling cemetery in Queens. Jaz’s mother cries. An uncle says a quick prayer. 

Jaz herself stands a few meters away. Blank. Impassive.

He feels like he’s watching her build walls around herself. She’d refused to talk to Preach or McG or Amir when he’d called the team that morning to check in. She’s spent most of the last twenty-four hours staring into space. He’d spent the night in his own room, so he can’t be sure, but the bags under her eyes tell him she didn’t sleep.

“How’s she doing?” Patricia asks quietly. They’re both standing in the shade of an ancient, leafy oak tree, watching Jaz greet the small crowd of assembled mourners. 

“Greet” might be an overstatement. She’s barely nodding at them as they express their condolences. He sees her flinch as an older man tells her what a good person her father was, what a terrible loss. 

Adam shakes his head. “About like that, I guess.” They both watch as she turns away from a sympathetic aunt or cousin or acquaintance, as her eyes drift in and out of focus. “Did she say anything to you yesterday?”

“No,” Patricia says. “It’s a lot to handle.”

“Yeah,” Adam says. Patricia doesn’t know the half of it. 

“It’s harder,” Patricia says. “When it’s unexpected.”

He knows that. He’s spent years trying to remember the last thing he’d said to his little sister. Years trying to recall the last time he’d told her he loved her, the last time he’d made her laugh. 

“This is my first funeral since my son’s,” Patricia confesses suddenly, and Adam feels a deep pang of empathy and sadness and gratitude. He hadn’t thought about how hard this must have been for Patricia, how much it was costing her to do this.

He puts a hand on her shoulder, squeezes gently. “Thank you,” he says. “For being here, for everything. I -- we couldn’t have gotten through this without you.”

“I told you,” she says with a shrug. “Anything.”

Adam watches as Jaz accepts a stiff hug from an elderly woman, and knows that he would do the same for her.

Anything. 

-o-o-

Her mother asks them to come back to the apartment -- the one Jaz grew up in, the one where her father threw her out a window, and did God knows what else to her -- and Adam is relieved when Jaz says no. She asks if they’d like to go out for dinner then, but Jaz says no to that too.

“Will you come over tomorrow?” her mother asks, and Jaz shakes her head.

“We have to head back,” Jaz says. 

Her mother’s eyes fill with tears again, but Jaz doesn’t react.

“Will you come visit me?” her mother asks. “When you’re back home?”

Jaz takes a slow, careful breath. “Sure,” she says. “When I’m on leave.”

Dalton can’t tell if she’s lying. 

Jaz’s mother nods. She goes to hug her, then thinks better of it. 

“He was very proud of you,” she says instead. “He didn’t know how to say it, but he was.”

Jaz tenses almost imperceptibly. 

“Okay,” she says.

She turns on her heel and walks to Patricia’s car.

-o-o-

Jaz is already packed to go back to Turkey, but Patricia tells them their flight isn’t for five days.

“Not till Monday?” she asks, almost distraught. 

“Take a few days,” Patricia says. They’re standing in an awkward triangle in Jaz’s hotel room, and Dalton glances uncomfortably from Patricia to Jaz, and back again.

“All due respect, Ma’am,” Jaz starts, but Patricia cuts her off. 

“Take a few days,” Patricia repeats. “That’s an order. Both of you.”

For a second, he thinks Jaz might throw her bag, or scream, or hit something. Instead, her shoulders drop, and she nods. 

“Okay,” she says, her voice small. “Thanks.”

“Good,” Patricia says, her voice firm, authoritative. “I need to head back to DC, but please don’t hesitate to call if you need anything.”

Adam glances at Jaz. She looks lost. Overwhelmed. It’s the most emotion he’s seen since her father died. 

“Thank you for being here,” he says. 

“Yes,” Jaz croaks. “It’s -- thank you.”

Patricia surprises them both by wrapping Jaz into a hug. Adam watches over Patricia’s shoulder as Jaz’s eyes fill with tears, as she struggles to compose her face.

“My phone’s always on,” she says, as she picks up her purse from the dresser. “Call me anytime.”

-o-o-

When the door closes behind Patricia, Jaz doesn’t move.

“So...vacation?” Adam tries to joke, when the silence finally gets to be too much for him. 

She turns to him, her eyes vulnerable. It throws him. “A week ago we were sleeping in a foxhole in the jungle outside of Bangui,” she says hoarsely.

He nods. It’s hard to imagine that. Hard to fathom how quickly things have changed, how much Jaz’s world has been rocked. 

They work in a job where the unexpected is normal, where life-changing events are standard. But he knows that what’s happened here is outside the realm of what Jaz expected would -- could -- change.

“Look,” he starts, taking a cautious step towards her. 

He watches her eyes shutter, watches her walls come back up. 

“It’s fine,” she says, shaking her head. “Nothing’s really changed, right?”

He sighs. “Jaz…”

“I’m fine,” she says, turning away from him. “It’s all fine.”

-o-o-


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys. Your reviews are amazing. And they make me happy, and they give me confidence, and they make me feel like I should keep posting even when I’m not sure. Thank you thank you thank you!
> 
> Chapter four may take a little longer...but here is chapter three!

-o-o-

He wants to take her to the Blue Ridge mountains, but it’s a bit too much of a drive, so he settles for upstate New York. Letchworth State Park, to be precise, where his parents had taken him and his sisters a couple times as kids.

He’d asked, of course, if there’d been anything she’d wanted to do. Had suggested visiting some of her friends, or spending a few days down the Jersey Shore, or maybe just doing some sightseeing in New York. He’d asked if maybe she wanted to reconsider spending some time with her mom. 

He’d even offered to back off, to let her have the days to herself if that’s what she’d wanted.

She’d offered no reply, no opinion -- had barely even acknowledged the question -- and that’s when he’d really started to worry. He’d never known Jaz to have no opinion.

He worries that if he leaves her she’ll spend five days alone in her hotel room, not sleeping or eating or speaking to anyone, so he packs her into the passenger seat of the car he’s rented and heads west, out of the city.

The leaves start to change color as the urban sprawl falls away, as the interstate becomes a country road, and Dalton lets himself enjoy the brilliant reds and golds. It’s been a long time since he’s spent autumn in the northeast, and he’s missed it.

He glances over at Jaz, silent and still beside him. She’s also staring out the window, but he’s not sure she’s seeing anything. 

Adam is familiar with grief, with the way it wraps its claws around your heart and steals the breath from your lungs. He’s familiar with how it can sneak up on you when you aren’t expecting it, with how it crashes over you in waves. He knows Jaz is too.

But he thinks maybe she wasn’t expecting it this time. That she wasn’t anticipating the loss of her father causing her any pain. He thinks the surprise, the unexpectedness of her grief, might be making it hurt even more. 

“You ever been up here?” he asks into the silence of the car, as he pulls off the highway and onto the quiet road that will take them into the park.

“No,” she says, her voice still that numb, lifeless monotone.

“It was one of my favorite places as a kid,” Dalton says. He grins at the sight of the Mockingbird Diner. “Man, I can’t believe that place is still here. That diner’s gotta be like a hundred years old.” 

He lets his eyes linger on the rundown building, on the beat-up Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs in the parking lot. It looks exactly the same as he remembers it, like traveling back in time. 

“That’s how my sisters and I would know we were almost there,” he remembers fondly. He can still picture them, four little kids crammed into the back of a rundown Ford station wagon, fighting over snacks and comic books.

He turns back to the road, catches Jaz watching him out of the corner of his eye. The look on her face is sad and hopeful and full of something he’s never seen before. Something he can’t describe.

It takes his breath away.

“What?” he manages. 

She shakes her head. Gives him a tiny, crooked smile. “Nothing,” she whispers, but she doesn’t take her eyes off of him.

He takes a quick glance up the road, makes sure he’s not about to hit anything. It’s the most she’s connected with him all week, and he doesn’t want to lose it.

“This place has the best waterfalls in the world,” he says, and she raises an eyebrow. “I’m serious! I’ve seen a lot of the so-called great waterfalls of the world, and I stand by that statement.”

Jaz breathes out something that might be a laugh. He takes it as encouragement. 

“And the stars here -- I guarantee you’ve never seen anything like it,” he says. “Sometimes you can even see the Milky Way.”

“Yeah?” she says softly.

“Oh yeah. We might be a little late in the year for that, but either way -- trust me, the stars are spectacular.”

“I do,” she says.

“You do?”

“Trust you.”

-o-o-

He goes to sleep on the couch of their little suite, and wakes up in the middle of the night to find the bed empty.

“Jaz?” he whispers into the darkness, but there’s no reply. 

He’s on his feet in a heartbeat. She’s not in the bathroom, and the room is small enough that--

The curtain flutters in the breeze, and he realizes -- the balcony.

He trips over his boots in his hurry to get out there, then freezes at the sight of her. She’s curled up in a lounge chair, wrapped in his sweatshirt, staring up at the stars. 

He feels a rush of something he can’t identify, and the only thought he can seem to grasp is she’s so goddamn beautiful.

“You were right,” Jaz says hoarsely, without turning around. He shouldn’t still be surprised that she has eyes in the back of her head, but he always is.

“About what?” he manages. 

“The stars,” she says, her voice watery. She’s been crying. “They’re amazing.”

He hesitantly sits down in the chair beside her. “You want me to tell you about them?” he asks. He isn’t sure how to read her, isn’t sure what she needs. 

She shakes her head, and he sighs, disappointed. “You want me to leave you alone?” he offers reluctantly.

She shakes her head again.

He breathes out. Sinks lower into the chair. 

She keeps watching the stars. He watches her.

-o-o-

“Do you still talk to your dad?” she asks, out of the blue.

They’re sitting on a rock in the sun, watching the Middle Falls crash over the gorge and into the Genesee River. She hadn’t said a word on the hike up here, and he’d been content to walk alongside her in silence. It’s something they’ve done a thousand times, and it feels comfortable and normal, even if nothing else does.

“My dad?” he says dumbly.

He’s stalling for time, and he knows it -- although he doesn’t know why.

“Yeah.”

He shrugs. Keeps his eyes on the rushing water. “Sometimes.”

The answer seems to surprise her. “Yeah?” she says.

“You know, holidays and birthdays,” he says. “I see him when I visit my sisters.”

“Huh,” Jaz says.

“He’s sober now,” Dalton says. “Feels like a different person, I guess.”

“Have they forgiven him?” Jaz asks. “Your sisters.”

Adam thinks about that. “No,” he says. “I guess we’ve all decided we could live with him without forgiving him.”

He turns to look at her. “When was the last time you talked to your dad?”

She doesn’t say anything for a long time, her eyes fixated on the waterfall. He thinks maybe he pushed too hard, but she surprises him. “When I got back from Afghanistan.”

Adam takes this in. “Six years ago.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’d just done my CST rotation in Kandahar, and I had four weeks before Delta selection. And I just thought…” She shakes her head. “I don’t know. It’s stupid.”

“Wanting to see your parents isn’t stupid,” he says gently.

“No, but…” She huffs in exasperation. “I wanted him -- I wanted something, and I should have known…”

She’d wanted her father to be proud of her, he realizes. 

“I thought -- you know there were like no women in Delta then,” she says. “It was just me and Ashley Black in that class, and I thought -- I mean, he’d wanted a boy.”

Dalton doesn’t know what to say. How to help her, how to make her feel even the tiniest bit better. 

“He didn’t care,” she says. “He didn’t -- and I realized there was nothing I could do. It wasn’t gonna matter.”

“And you haven’t talked to him since?” he asks.

Jaz shakes her head. “My mother’s called, once or twice. I never answer though, and she never calls back, so…”

Preach is wrong, he thinks. She’s not going to get any closure from this -- there’s never going to be any closure.

All she wants is for her dad to tell her that he’s proud of her. And that’s never going to happen.

-o-o-

He wakes up in the middle of the night again -- jet lag is a bitch -- and again finds her bed empty. 

He sighs. He’s pretty sure she’s gotten about five total hours of sleep in the last week. He’s not sure how she’s still functioning. 

He goes to check the balcony again -- but before he can get there, he realizes she’s crying. She’s desperately trying to muffle the sound, but it’s unmistakable, and God it hurts to hear. 

There’s only a sliding glass door between them, but it might as well be an ocean.

He tugs on a t-shirt and slips out the front door.

-o-o-

“How’s she doing?” Preach asks, in lieu of a greeting.

“We shouldn’t have done this,” Adam says, in lieu of an answer. 

“Top,” Preach sighs.

“It didn’t give her closure,” Adam says. He’s angry at himself, not Preach -- but he can’t help taking it out on his teammate. “It just dug up old stuff.”

“Adam, that stuff was dug up already,” Preach says patiently. “You couldn’t protect her from it.”

There’s something about the way he says it that punches Adam in the gut. “Protect her?” he says defensively. “I’m not trying to -- Jaz doesn’t need anyone to protect her. I’m just trying to -- I’m the CO! All I want is to…”

He can’t seem to finish the sentence. 

What is he trying to do?

He’d dropped everything and flown halfway around the world to be by her side at her father’s deathbed. They’re now essentially on vacation together -- just the two of them, sharing a room in a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere. 

He’d done all of it without thinking, without questioning. And now he wonders -- would he have done the same thing for McG? For Preach? For Amir?

Come to think of it, would he have rampaged across enemy territory, breaking all the rules in the book, for any of them?

On the other end of the line, Preach is silent. 

“I’m just trying to help her,” he finishes lamely. “Everything she’s been through this year, I’m just…”

“The two of you are a lot alike, you know,” Preach says finally. 

He does know. They both had abusive fathers, they’re both stubborn as hell, they both--

“Neither of you can face how you feel,” Preach finishes.

“It’s not that simple,” Adam sputters.

“Course it is,” Preach says. “You just don’t want it to be.”

-o-o-

In the morning, Dalton takes Jaz up a steep climb to Inspiration Point. He hadn’t been able to fall back asleep after his conversation with Preach, so he knows that Jaz was up all night too -- but it seems like the exertion might be just what they both need.

“This was my dad’s favorite spot,” he says, when they finally reach the top. It overlooks another fantastic waterfall, and a luminous spread of wild fall colors that seems to stretch all the way to Canada. “He used to take me up here every time we came. Just me. My sisters would stay down by the creek with my mom, and the two of us would do that climb.”

He smiles at the memory, remembers being a little boy struggling to keep up with his father’s long strides. Remembers sitting in this exact spot, the sun on his face, his dad’s arm around his shoulders, feeling proud and happy and safe.

It’s not a feeling he remembers having often. But it’s all he can think of when he looks at Inspiration Falls below them.

“That sounds nice,” Jaz says wistfully. 

She takes a shuddery breath, and he realizes she’s trying not to cry. 

“Hey,” he says gently, wrapping his arm around her. “It’s okay to be sad.”

She shakes her head, but she can’t seem to stop the tears. “I wanted him dead for so long,” she confesses. “He never loved me -- so I don’t understand why...it doesn’t make sense that…”

“I think he loved you,” Dalton whispers, running his hand up and down her arm. “I think he just didn’t know how.”

“There are just so many things that I wanted that now…” she chokes. 

“I know,” he murmurs, pressing his lips to her temple. 

She lets go then, crying into his chest.

He holds onto her. 

-o-o-

He finds her out on the balcony again, staring out at the setting sun. The glow lights up her face, and it takes Adam’s breath away.

It’s wrong, he knows. She’s grieving, and in pain, and he’s supposed to be here supporting her, selflessly. 

And it’s wrong because they can’t. Because he’s her CO, and because she deserves so much better than a hidden tryst, than a relationship with consequences that could end her career. 

She deserves so much better than him. 

“Stop staring,” she mutters after a few minutes, and he laughs. 

“You ready to go?” he asks, stepping up to the railing beside her. He’s made a dinner reservation at a fancy little place in a nearby town, and he’s excited and nervous to be taking her out to a restaurant.

Like they’re a couple, on a date.

“Thanks for bringing me here,” she says, her eyes still fixed on the glowing sun.

“Of course,” he says, confused. 

She turns to look at him, and he can’t read her. “You didn’t have to,” she says. “You didn’t have to do any of it.”

“I wanted to,” he whispers. His heart is pounding.

She smiles at him sadly, and Adam feels the sudden, overpowering urge to kiss her. 

It’s scary how badly he wants it. His hands are shaking and his mouth is dry, and he’s moving forward without conscious thought or permission. 

Jaz’s eyes are wide and dark, and he can’t seem to look away from them. His fingers slide into her hair, his other hand drifting up her back.

“Top,” she says, but he doesn’t listen.

His lips meet hers, and then he’s kissing her, and it’s like something inside of him settles for the first time in his life. He knows he should be terrified right now, knows this is a Very Bad Idea -- but all he feels is peace. 

Until she pulls away from him, and now he clearly recognizes the look in her eyes.

Terror.

“Jaz,” he tries, but she shakes her head. Takes a step back, bumps hard into the railing. “I’m sorry, I…”

“No,” she says. She looks around, a cornered wild animal. “No, I -- I’m sorry, I...you don’t…”

She pushes past him, running back into the hotel room.

He hears the front door slam before he can process what’s happened.

-o-o-


End file.
